Home Assistant 2026.9 entered its beta cycle on 26 August 2026, with the stable release due on the usual first-Wednesday-of-the-month schedule — expected 2 September 2026. This release leans into the security side of the dashboard, adds a genuinely useful Matter network map, and cleans up how integrations share hardware like Modbus buses. It also removes the VLC integration outright, which is the one change worth checking before you update if you rely on it. Below is a breakdown of what's new, what's changed under the hood, and what to check first if you run Matter, Modbus, or VLC in your setup.
What's new in the Home Assistant security dashboard?
The security dashboard now has an "Active alerts" section that surfaces urgent issues — an open door, an unlocked sensor, anything flagged with a severity level — without you needing to hunt through the entities list. Alongside it, a new "Favourites" section lets you pin the entities you check most often, so a specific door sensor or camera doesn't get buried under everything else the dashboard tracks. Both were built directly from community requests rather than an internal roadmap item, and neither requires any new hardware or integration — they work with whatever binary sensors, locks, and alarm entities you already have set up. If you're building out a security setup in Home Assistant for the first time, our alarm panel guide and best home security system guide cover the entities and hardware this dashboard is designed to surface.
Does the Matter network map show Thread and Wi-Fi separately?
Yes — Matter devices now get a network topology map that shows which devices are on Thread and which are on Wi-Fi, along with device types and signal strength for each connection. This brings Matter in line with what Home Assistant already offered for Zigbee and Z-Wave networks, where a visual map of hops and signal strength has been standard for a while. For anyone who's added a handful of Matter devices without much sense of how they're actually routing traffic — especially mixed Thread/Wi-Fi households — this is the first time that's been visible without third-party tools. If you're still setting Matter up for the first time, our Matter setup guide walks through pairing devices before this map becomes useful.
Shared Modbus connections and other integration changes
Modbus-based integrations can now share a single connection to the same bus instead of each integration opening its own, which previously caused conflicts when more than one service tried to talk to the same device over Modbus. Fronius, Sofar Inverter Modbus, and Flexit are the first integrations updated to use shared connections, which matters most for solar inverter and ventilation setups running multiple Modbus-based integrations side by side.
Four new integrations land in this release: Ridder HortiMaX Pro (HortOS) for greenhouse climate control, Flow it, Hotspring for hot tub and spa monitoring, and a virtual Ariston integration for heating systems. A handful of existing integrations move up the quality scale too — Google Health reaches platinum, WiiM reaches gold, and LED Infrared is updated to platinum.
Tile cards, charts, and the History panel
The Tile card picks up three new capabilities: light effect selection, vacuum fan speed control, and expanded target humidity support for climate entities — useful if you've been relying on the more detailed but bulkier entity-specific cards just to change a vacuum's fan speed or a light's effect. The History and Activity panels gain a unified "Sources" filter that lets you filter by floor, area, device, domain, or integration in one place, and the Activity detail view now shows the full chain of what triggered a change — which automation or script fired, and what it passed through before the entity itself changed state.
Charts across the dashboard now support full keyboard navigation, screen reader support, and sonification — audio tones that represent data points, so trends in a graph can be understood without reading it visually. This is one of the more significant accessibility additions Home Assistant has shipped, and it applies broadly rather than to a single card type.
What breaks: VLC integration removed, and other breaking changes
The VLC integration has been removed from Home Assistant Core in 2026.9. If you use VLC as a media player target in automations or dashboards, that integration will stop working once you update — there's no drop-in replacement bundled with this release, so check whether your VLC setup can be swapped for a different media player integration before updating if it's load-bearing in your automations.
Beyond VLC, this release deprecates rather than removes most things: KNX exposes no longer send initial values, LLM tool names now require domain prefixes, and both update actions and Z-Wave lock management actions now require an administrator account to run — worth checking if you have automations running under a non-admin user that touch updates or Z-Wave locks. Several device registry APIs used by custom integrations are also deprecated in this release ahead of removal in a future one, which mainly affects custom integration developers rather than everyday users.
Should you install the beta?
If you don't rely on VLC and don't run automations under a restricted account touching updates or Z-Wave locks, the 2026.9 beta is low-risk to try — but as with any beta, back up first. The security dashboard alerts and Matter network map are both genuinely useful additions rather than cosmetic changes, and the shared Modbus connection fix resolves a real conflict for anyone running multiple Modbus integrations against the same inverter or ventilation unit. As always, back up your configuration before installing a beta release — see our backup and restore guide if that isn't already automated — and expect the stable release to follow roughly two weeks after the beta, in line with Home Assistant's usual monthly cycle. If you're still catching up from last month, our 2026.8 port 80 update breakdown and its device-split automation fix are worth reading first.
